Psychoanalysis of Nazism

Laurence A. Rickels analyses the condition of "unmourning" in literature, film, philosophy, and psychoanalysis across his collected work of fifteen publications, beginning with Aberrations of Mourning (1988). He dislodged this concept from the traditional opposition between successful mourning and melancholia. Psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, and deconstruction inform his perspective.

"Laurence Rickels offers blazing illumination of the invisible undertow of disquiet and uncanny in our knowledge of culture, consciousness and technology. The riveting conclusions of his research are matched by his persistence and command in unveiling their implications for our here and now." - Jonathan Lethem"For Freud, symptoms bore the dual-imprint of conflicts between the repressed unconscious wishes on the one hand and the defences on the other that brought them about. Such compromise-formations can thus reveal something of their origins to the careful reader. This latest volume by Laurence Rickels, the acclaimed author of the monumental three-volume Nazi Psychoanalysis (2002), brings a new generation of readers back to the dark days of National Socialism in Germany and its aftermath in the post-war GDR in his exploration of the lure of Nazi ideas, particularly on the psychoanalysts Alexander Mette and Gerhart Scheunert. Rickels’s careful reading uncovers not just the resultant deformaties this wrecked in their lives and praxis, but its wider influence on psychoanalysis in Germany and beyond. In a new era where totalitarian politics is again on the rise, where strong-man ideologies flex, where truth and lies compete, and there are miriad pressure towards conformity and group-think, Rickels’s work is not just a fascinating retrospective study but consititues a particularly prescient warning from history. Thoroughly recommended!” - Roger Willoughby, Oxford Brookes University, clinical psychologist and historian of psychoanalysis, Gradiva Award winner, author of Masud Khan: The Myth and the Reality (2005) and Freud’s British Family: Reclaiming Lost Lives in Manchester and London (2024), and co-editor of historiesofpsychoanalysis.com

• IntroductionPart One: Initiation and Adaptation1 The Ideas of March2 Helping Handout3 Can the Child Mourn?4 ErziehungPart Two: The Freudo-Marxist 1 Sisyphus2 Leitmotif Siegfried: Walter Benjamin and Alexander Mette3 Hölderlin and the Language of Schizophrenia 4 Dionysian Perspective5 Banned for 998 Years 6 Ausfahrt Mette7 On the Unconscious and in the Language of the Third Reich8 Back in the GDR9 Westward Ho10 Freud in Perspective11 Nietzsche Flunks Sociology12 Politics and Psychosis, Commemoration and MelancholiaPart Three: The Nazi Psychoanalyst1 The Letter2 False and True Self 3 From Neutralization to the Masochistic Defense4 The True Self in the Countertransference and Abstinence á deuxConclusion: A German History of Psychoanalysis